Over the years, I have captured over 5,000 images, including vacations, travel, and screenshots.
But about 4,000 of them are pictures of my three dogs, and finding a particular image I want to share can be a real task.
I still have to dig through a stockpile of images to find the one I want, even with Google Photos’ people and pets feature.
Then I found an open source gallery app that lets me search with AI, all while offline.
I will always prefer local offline AI over Gemini for scanning images
Can’t trust Gemini with photos of my dogs
My biggest complaint about Google Photos isn’t its features, but that it uses Gemini to scan faces and images to generate recommendations and memories.
While I get the benefits of using AI to organize images, I’m not a big fan of Google’s tracking and telemetry. Thankfully, I found an app called Memoria that uses local AI to do the same job as Google Photos.
I tested the app for a week and was surprised by how well it performs. I’ve used it to find countless images on my phone, saving a lot of time.
Memoria uses Apple’s MobileCLIP-S0 model and runs 100% offline after installation. You only need to grant the app permissions and select the folders you want it to index.
After it indexes images, you can search using phrases, scenes, and descriptions, along with the usual metadata and keywords.
It also supports multiple languages: English, Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish. The app is also only 100MB and doesn’t take up any space on your phone.
Memoria is only available on GitHub, but another gallery app with the same name is available in the Play Store. It’s a different app that needs personal information and isn’t open source.
Apart from text queries, you can use images to find similar images in your gallery. You can use the crop-to-search feature or share an image from another app to find similar images.
Memoria saves search history that you can pin and use with the confidence slider. The confidence slider adjusts how strictly the app follows your description and text input.
How I found years-old images I thought I lost using Memoria
Getting my memories back
I’m not a big fan of how Google Photos handles older images, and finding years-old images can be annoying. But Memoria let me find pictures I vaguely remembered but couldn’t recall any details about.
For example, I remember visiting a certain beach years ago, but since I’ve visited many beaches, I couldn’t remember which one.
I had a vague memory of a rudimentary boat on the beach, so I searched for “boat at beach,” and Memoria gave me the results I wanted. I could find the image and share it with my family without spending 15 minutes searching.
Similarly, I wanted to retrieve an old physical receipt I’d photographed and saved to my gallery. I searched for “receipt” or the business name, and I found the image in seconds.
Memoria let me relive my memories better than Google Photos could. Images I thought were lost or that I couldn’t find earlier were just a search away.
Everything Memoria could improve to become my default gallery app
Since Memoria is an open source app, it is still in active development. While the app is stable, updating it requires downloading the latest build from GitHub.
But now that F-Droid supports updates, the app should hit the open source platform soon. This will cure any update headaches, but for now you will have to make do with GitHub.
Another issue I noticed was during Memoria’s indexing phase. If you have a lot of images to index, it could take some time the first time you set it up.
This also means the phone heats up and drains a lot of battery during the initial setup. I recommend keeping a charger nearby while your phone is plugged in.
After the index is done, indexing new images is seamless and doesn’t drain battery life. But for Memoria to become my default gallery, it needs a few more functions.
Basic actions like move, copy, and delete are still on the roadmap. So if you use Google Photos, I wouldn’t ditch that yet.
Finally, search accuracy isn’t perfect, but I’ve found that using keywords along with descriptions is the best way to find images.
Use the Balanced option on the confidence slider for the best results in Memoria.
Even with the issues I mentioned, Memoria is satisfying, and I can see it becoming my default gallery app after it adds the features mentioned earlier.
It might not be a strong contender to replace Google Photos right now, but I’m confident it will be over time.
Memoria is going to be an incredible gallery app that can replace Google Photos
Google Photos has some incredible and annoying features at the same time. But the forceful inclusion of AI features leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I don’t object to using AI for productivity and daily tasks, but having it scan personal images and memories feels intrusive.
Thankfully, Memoria’s open source ethos and local offline AI features will make it a worthy replacement. It’s just a matter of time.
